Summer Heights High: articles

School for scandal

Stand by for more deliciously wrong moments and characters in Chris Lilley's new series..

THE word around the ABC television studios is that Chris Lilley shows some of the classic signs of comic genius. Like many masters of the multiple-character genre (Peter Sellers, Benny Hill and Matt Lucas spring to mind), Lilley is said to be rather beige in comparison to the colourful stars of his debut hit series, We Can Be Heroes. He has a reputation for being painfully shy and frustratingly reserved when giving interviews. He can't bear being photographed as himself and he's also a chronic workaholic and control freak.

While the latter is true (he loves Mondays, never takes holidays and is terrified that the person who will broadcast the premiere of his new show Summer Heights High will play the wrong tape), Chris Lilley is anything but beige.

And while he has a tendency to drop eye contact while formulating his thoughts and trails sentences with "like" and "kind of", he could hardly be described as shy. Milestones of the past year, such as winning the international Rose d'Or for best male comedy performance and the inaugural Graham Kennedy Logie for outstanding new talent, and seeing We Can Be Heroes launch to critical acclaim in the US (and more than 30 other countries, including Iraq), should have boosted his confidence.

He's warm, analytical and while impressed with his success, is far too busy working on every aspect of his new show - from the background music to the opening credits - to bother basking in it. To paraphrase Hollywood producer Samuel Goldwyn: the harder Lilley works, the luckier he gets.

"I am in the most lucky position," he says. "I don't have any pressure from anyone apart from myself. I think after the last show, the network is just keen for me to do whatever. It sounds like I'm bragging, but if I said I want to set a show in a hospital and I want to play 20 characters, they'd probably say, 'Cool, we trust you'."

Producer Laura Waters, who also produced We Can Be Heroes, calls Lilley a visionary, and hates reining in his imagination with budget constraints. Director Stuart McDonald (The Secret Life of Us), says that although Lilley occasionally needs to be directed, "he is totally in control of what he wants. He can see the big picture".

Summer Heights High, a devilishly funny mockumentary set in a suburban Melbourne school, will not disappoint fans. The star roles - megalomaniac drama teacher Mr G, who first appeared on 2003 sketch show Big Bite; Ja'mie King the precocious private schoolgirl from We Can Be Heroes; and a new character, Jonah Takalua, a Tongan class clown - are beautiful portraits of familiar stereotypes that provide perfect platforms from which their creator can veer into dangerous terrain, something Lilley does frequently.

Mr G, the mincing, self-proclaimed performing arts director has issues with the disabled students who want to take part in Annabel Dickson: The Musical - inspired by a school tragedy. Ja'mie, on a school exchange program to promote better understanding between public and private schools, dumps the "fugly" friend assigned to her upon arrival at Summer Heights and agrees to hang out with the "hot" girls even though one is "Asian, but a hot Asian". And Jonah is the bane of the student welfare worker's life - not even a Polynesian Pathways program looks like it will save him from being expelled a third time in 18 months.

As with Ricky Wong, the Chinese physics genius and amateur actor from We Can Be Heroes, Lilley relies on a wig and sidekicks of the same culture to build the illusion of Jonah's ethnicity, but it is the detail of his mannerisms, the subtlety of his accent and precision of movement, that make this white, 31-year-old private school graduate's portrayal of a troubled 13-year-old Islander boy frighteningly spot-on. Even his support cast seem to accept him as one of their own.

"It's weird, like it was with Ricky, they don't kind of go, 'What's that bloke doing?'. They either don't notice or else feel completely normal around me. Unintentionally, I half stay in character when I'm around set, and even I'll go home at night and I'll still be a little bit that character, not as any Method thing - it just happens. So those boys only ever knew me as this partly Jonah thing. Halfway through the shoot, one of them came up to me and went, 'You're not really like the character that you play, are you?' He'd seen me being really serious and going through scripts. I think they liked it.

"The Islander boys, for whatever reason, didn't learn their lines, which was really good in the end because they'd turn up on the day and I'd explain to them the scene and roughly the sort of things I wanted them to say and then the cameras would roll and we'd get some really great natural moments out of them. I don't really rehearse that much, it's very much in the moment."

While Lilley certainly pushes boundaries by building gags around minorities, they are never the butt of jokes. The laughs are always on Lilley's ludicrous, larger-than-life personas.

"I think most people will understand that Jonah's a character and just a naughty kid. The fact that he's an Islander is kind of irrelevant," he says, before contradicting himself: "Some racial issues do come up later on in the series. Really, Jonah just wants to have fun at school and he's pretty harmless."

DESPITE having played Mr G before, Lilley sat in on countless drama classes to refresh the character. Researching Jonah, he hung out with gangs of Islander students in Sydney schools.

"I realised that a good way of doing (Summer Heights High) was to cover the schoolboy-world, schoolgirl-world and the teacher-world. It was three key characters who were going to open up those worlds, through their eyes. And I wanted to flesh out the characters more than I did with We Can Be Heroes. I wanted to spend more time with them and get to know them and get to know their supporting cast. So then I needed to leave space and have less characters."

The supporting cast is made up of actors and non-actors. No stone was left unturned in the search for the perfect people for major roles such as Rodney, the science teacher and Mr G's fawning assistant on the musical (Stanley Roach, a fireman) and the school principal Mrs Murray (Elida Brereton, a school principal). Lilley even had his girlfriend approach 16-year-old Sally Kingsford in a restaurant, because she looked perfect for the part of the school dag. Casting Ja'mie's new clique proved the most difficult, due to the character's popularity.

"We kept finding girls who were fans of We Can Be Heroes and who were doing Ja'mie impersonations and really trying to play it for laughs. It was a bit of a search to find girls who were willing to play it straight."

The enormous cast of extras was made up of students at the school, who often had to be coerced to stay behind after hours. Goofing was stamped out with a terse warning that they would end up on the cutting room floor. And Lilley kept a hawk's eye out for camera phones.

Lilley says his favourite person on set was Danny Alasbbagh, an actor with Down syndrome who plays Mr G's teacher's pet, Toby.

"(Danny) was just so fun and so easy. You didn't have to tiptoe around him and treat him carefully. He's really easy to direct and remembered everything that he had to do and loved the whole illusion that he was Toby. He knew what was happening in the scenes, you could see that. But it's the same with the other actors. Sometimes I wonder whether half the people around me are getting it. But I think that's what works on screen."

It seems odd, in an era of rampant political correctness, that Lilley has never been accused of cultural insensitivity. Not even when he played Ricky Wong, playing a traditional Aboriginal dancer performing the Indigeridoo song-and-dance number at the 2006 Logies - with a star turn by Cathy Freeman.

"Everyone told me I should be worried about Ricky, the Asian thing and the Aboriginal stuff, and I started believing them. And then it didn't worry anyone, or at least I didn't hear any bad reports. In fact, from Asian people, I get good reports. I have had a lot of Asian people come up to me on the street and tell me how much they love (the character) and they do Ricky Wong impersonations. My friend is a drama teacher and at their school they have the Ricky Wong award for the most try-hard Asian student in a production."

Life is full of surreal moments for Lilley. His Logies performance was definitely one of them.

"I remember getting changed for the show and they didn't give Cathy Freeman a dressing room for some reason and she was like, 'Where will I go?' And I was like, 'I'll just get into my thing and then you get changed'. So I got into the Aboriginal outfit and then came out and I was like, 'OK, now you go in', and she'd had her silver outfit taken out of a museum, it was the real thing, and she goes, 'Oh, I'm just really emotional, I haven't worn this since the Olympics', and so I went, 'Just get it on!' She put it on in like two seconds and then she came out and she was a bit emotional and I was like, 'What am I doing? I'm dressed as an Aborigine hugging Cathy Freeman and she's feeling emotional about this really significant outfit in sport history and now we're about to sing and dance on stage."'

That performance might not have happened had Lilley not boldly suggested the concept, after the Nine Network initially approached him with the suggestion that Ja'mie might like to conduct red-carpet interviews about fashion, before the awards ceremony. It's not the only time that his carefully crafted character has been mistaken for a drag act.

"I don't know anything about fashion and I'm not a drag queen," he says. "I can see why people would think that. But people forget the character is scripted and thought about for a long time. I get offered things like, 'Can Ja'mie come to my fete and do a four-hour performance for nothing?' I get asked to do lots of free stuff. People think that I just turn up and put the wig on and I am Ja'mie. When I went to LA and met all these film producer people, one of them said, 'Oh, we've got this great space movie coming up, there's a drag queen in it'. And I'm like, 'Cool, so that was their take on me'."

Lilley's masterful female impersonation skills have won him a gay following.

"The gay community loves (We Can Be Heroes' competitive roller) Pat Mullins and Ja'mie. I wrote some stuff for a gay magazine as Ja'mie that went down really well. I did wonder when I did We Can Be Heroes whether it would get a massive gay following but I don't think it has, really. I get 60-year-old women coming up to me, they're my people."

The ABC has told Lilley that the demographic ratings for We Can be Heroes indicate he has a largely adult male fan base, an unusual result for ABC comedy. He is worried that, with a 9.30pm timeslot, school students might miss out on Summer Heights High.

"What was so fascinating about making this show was the whole concept of adults controlling kids and telling them how to behave and what they should be when they grow up. I've always been fascinated by that. There's a world of stories in schools. Summer Heights has some tragic moments but it's always funny, hopefully, that's the idea. But I like to make things a bit unexpected and a bit shocking."

His premiere nerves relate mainly to technical aspects which are beyond his famously tight control. "I just worry. I shouldn't worry too much. I just can't believe that it all comes down to a tape. That you've spent all this time and money and effort and it's a tape that someone has to put in and press play. Anything could happen.

"I'm sure it will be fine. I'm sure that people know what they're doing with the tape."